This Week in the Voice: The Nonprofit 1 Percent

March 21, 2012

This week in the Voice, out today: Steven Thrasher discovers that some nonprofit managers in New York — including at the Jewish Guild for the Blind — aren’t just rich, but among society’s wealthiest: “Although he runs a nonprofit, Alan Morse is comfortably in the 1 percent that Occupy Wall Street has made everyone so much more aware of. In fact, if you use The New York Times‘ ‘What Percent Are You?’ interactive tool, you’ll see that Morse was in the top 1 percent not just nationally, but also in the higher-earning New York metropolitan region, even before his big raise in 2009. In the nonprofit world, things don’t turn out to be so different than in places like Wall Street.”

In food, Robert Sietsema savors South African fare at Kaia: “The food at Kaia (‘hut’ in Zulu) flaunts remarkable flavors. Among charcuterie choices, find two types of South African preserved beef: biltong (dark curls of pungent, white-veined flesh dry as the desert); and droëwors (like Slim Jims, only good).”

Maura Johnston examines at South by Southwest, and wonders whether new acts can still muscle into the music fest: “The heavy weight of larger names (and those super-size snacks) made it tougher for even the most talked-about up-and-comers to gain critical mass among the deluge of press beamed back from Austin.”

Melissa Anderson reviews The Hunger Games, and finds that the film adaption of the wildly popular YA book visually sates, but doesn’t fully convey the text’s passion: “Like the pacing of the novel, the film, even at almost two and a half hours, moves briskly, continuously drawing us in…It is impossible for this movie to ever hope to match the fury of the book. Collins is no great prose stylist, but through her very premise, she astringently articulates her anger at a culture–ours–indifferent to inequity and war and besotted with its own stupidity.”

Michael Feingold finds that Mike Nichols’ adaption of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is outright masterful: “Nichols demonstrates his affinity for the concept of a sustained tradition with a daring stroke here. Having seen Elia Kazan’s original 1949 production of Salesman as a youngster, he has re-created two of the key elements that helped give that celebrated achievement its power: Jo Mielziner’s set design and Alex North’s incidental music.”

And in art, Robert Shuster heads to the Thierry Goldberg Gallery, where he checks out Oded Hirsch’s work, which “offers poignant visions, grand and small, of spiritual fulfillment. The centerpiece, Nothing New (loosely based on a short story by Amos Oz), opens with a captivating scene: a man dangling from power lines, harnessed to a tangled parachute.”